Eight-year wait is over to hear ‘we’re going in’
‘Upside down, mate,” Anna Osbourne said to Sonya Rockhouse when she saw Rockhouse holding the photo of her son Ben the wrong way up.
Actually, after eight long years, things must finally have felt the right way up for the two women who lost a husband and a son in the Pike River disaster in 2010.
Rockhouse, Osborne and Bernie Monk had just watched as the minister responsible for the Pike River Agency, Andrew Little, announced a plan to re-enter the drift at Pike River Mine is to go ahead.
They would have known in advance, but hearing it out loud and publicly is altogether different. They stood holding photos: Rockhouse’s son Ben, Osbourne’s husband Milton and Monk’s son Michael.
As Little said the words “the reentry of the Pike River Mine will proceed”, Rockhouse and Osborne looked at each other and gulped with emotion. They smiled in relief.
Rockhouse’s arm went around Osborne, their faces turned upward in a bid to stop tears, and then all three engulfed each other in a hug.
As they stood hugging, Little spoke on, about the extra funding required, the technicalities of pumping in nitrogen, timelines, safety precautions, the work that lay ahead.
For the eight years since the explosion that took the lives of those men in the photos Rockhouse, Osborne and Monk held, they had been told it could not be done.
They had stood defiant as politician after politician traipsed over to the West Coast, former Prime Ministers John Key and Bill English offering excuses for why it could not be done.
Then came other politicians too, with promises made in the heat of an election campaign which the families must have barely dared to believe.
They came from NZ First leader Winston Peters and then Little. After Little came Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, the Greens, United Future and the Ma¯ ori Party. So many politicians, so many promises.
Finally, yesterday, a “beginning” as Rockhouse put it. “We are just at the beginning now, but the beginning is better than we’ve ever had before.”
The Prime Minister was not there for the announcement, nor was Peters. Both were overseas. After the decision to go ahead was approved by Cabinet on Monday, it was also decided that after waiting eight years, the families should not have to wait even a week longer just so the PM could be there for the announcement.
For Little, too, the occasion was noteworthy. He was former head of the miners’ union.
After saying he would look again at re-entry, he was accused of being reckless, of playing politics, toying with the emotions of the families and proposing to put the lives of others at risk. There was a distinct suspicion the promise to the people of Pike River was one of those things said in Opposition but dismissed in Government.
Little did add caveats when he agreed to the re-entry plan yesterday. He spoke of it as an “extraordinarily complex undertaking”. He said safety was “paramount”. He read from the Pike Agency’s report to him a paragraph that said a lot remained unknown: “this will require agile thinking, the courage of all to say NO if we are uncomfortable . . . and knowing when to call it quits”.
It made it clear it was still far from a risk-free proposition and there were no guarantees the answers those Pike families seek will emerge when that re-entry goes ahead early next year.
But on a sunny Wednesday in a meeting room in Parliament, the only three words that mattered were those uttered by Little: “We are returning”.
Re-entry based on hope
There was never much doubt the present Government would grant the wish of Pike River families to re-enter the mine as far as that may be done safely. The previous Government was advised it could not be done safely but evidently that is now not so, though the re-entry plan announced yesterday looks not very different in its essentials. Sealed chambers in the mine access tunnel will allow the air to be stabilised, possibly as far as a rockfall more than 2km from the entrance.
The mine proper, in which 29 men were killed, descends from a point some way beyond the rockfall. The families’ hope of recovering any remains depends on the possibility that one or more of them might have been in the tunnel when the mine exploded, as two survivors were. The fact those two were able to walk out of the mine after the explosion suggests no others were in the tunnel, but for some of the families, hope springs eternal.
If the re-entry discovers no human remains, there is at least the possibility that forensic evidence will be found pointing to the cause of the first explosion and permitting those responsible to be held personally to account at last for 29 deaths. A royal commission of inquiry produced damning conclusions of the cause of the disaster based on testimony of those who knew the mine, and the mine insurers have made a payout to the families, but it is possible something found in the tunnel will provide a clearer explanation, possibly even an indictable one.
On these remote possibilities the Government is staking $36 million, an extraordinary increase on the $7.2m plan put to the previous Government just five years ago. And yet the minister in charge, Andrew Little, has obviously chosen the cheapest of three options put to him by the Pike River Recovery Agency. Like the 2013 plan, this one uses a single entry at the existing portal. The other options involved drilling a small second tunnel or a large additional borehole for ventilation.
The recovery agency has already built airtight seals 30m and 170m along the tunnel and has set up the pump that will drive nitrogen into the chambers to displace the explosive methane that will still be in there. Little and his recovery agency do not sound sure of what they will be able to do beyond the second chamber only 170m into the 2km tunnel. Little said, “There is a lot we don’t know and will not know until we are confronted with the situation as we find it.”
Clearly a lot could go wrong. Volatile methane bubbles may not be able to be entirely removed from ceilings of uneven rock. Safety remains paramount. But the families that have been pressing for a re-entry for eight years have been rewarded for their persistence. They have never sounded hopeful a recovery effort could get further than the rockfall. They must accept this plan could get that far and find nothing of their loved ones. If nothing else, it surely provides the “closure” they need.